Pastor Desiderio Espinoza baptizing in Mayo River canal in Mayo indian village of San Ignacio

DIOS LES BENDIGA! The Antioch Baptist Convention of Sonora unites in work and fellowship churches located from the Arizona border to the Sinaloa border 500 miles south. Our purpose is to better glorify God and strengthen our congregations by uniting our efforts to do together what one church alone can't do. We especially emphasize the areas of Evangelism, New Church Starts, Pastoral and Lay Training, Christian Education and Fellowship on the city and state level.

Sonora is a great challenge to Baptist work, being one of the states of Mexico with the least Evangelical presence. Only 1% of the 1,000,000+ population of the state capital Hermosillo are Evangelical Christians. It is urgent that we make greater efforts to spread the Gospel of Jesus here. The state's mixture of prosperity with extreme poverty plus historic isolation by mountains, sea, and desert from the rest of Mexico and the US, has left it as something of a difficult frontier for Baptist work in Mexico.

JOIN US TO EVANGELIZE THE STATE OF SONORA

We thank God that for a recent revival of love and spirit of evangelism which is opening a new era of work and growth among our churches. The Antioch Baptist Convention of Sonora and its churches are receptive to cooperation and collaboration with churches, ministries, or conventions in the US or Canada for construction or evangelism trips, joint mission ventures, sister-church programs, or whatever else may be the Lord's will.
CONTACT US!

WHO WE ARE Doctrinally, Baptists and all other traditional Evangelical
Christian churches in Mexico are conservative or fundamentalist in US terms. In a culture
where Protestants are a small ridiculed and often oppressed minority, liberal or
modernistic doctrines such as are common in the US would not survive. The churches of
our fellowship would certainly be considered fundamentalist in US terms, and are normal,
average Mexican Baptist churches.

In terms of origins or affiliations,
the Antioch Baptist Convention unites in fellowship several churches of convention
Baptist and independent Baptist origins plus oneor two churches of "Bible church" and
Conservatives Baptist origins. In the main these are churches in the city of Hermosillo
which by 1990 were no longer in very active contact and fellowship with whatever group
had initiated the work 30 or 40 years before. Even the churches supposedly members of
national Baptist organizations were essentially independent locally. By 1992-93 there had
developed a certain informal relationship in which the pastors met for fellowship
breakfasts and the churches participated together in certain events.

In
this period there came into being a major national law in the Republic of Mexico regarding
religious activities. The new law gave Evangelical groups both important new rights and
added responsibilities. One new requirement was that all local churches must be
registered with the government as members of some recognized organization of churches.
Also they must now make income tax declarations, enroll their pastors in the social
security hospital system, plus a number of other legal requirements. The new legal,
bookkeeping and other requirements were simply beyond the means of most churches to
fulfill individually.

The need to work together to meet these new
requirements and the new registration requirement led to the formation of many new
conventions of churches in Mexico. In our case, some of our churches could have
registered with organizations with which they were already loosely affiliated, others could
not. We were also motivated by the desire to work together more formally to complete
the Great Commission. What we chose to do was formally organize the churches who
were already loosely associated together, plus a few similar-situated churches from other
parts of the state of Sonora, into the Antioch Baptist Convention.

GLORIA A DIOS!

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